Top Ten: ChemEd DL's Best

Explore chemistry with ChemEd DL and find a wealth of instructional materials. Here are the ones we think you will find most interesting. Visit our Resources, Collections,Communities, and Online Services pages to find many other items for teachers and students.

Periodic Table Live!

Learn about the history, uses, properties, structures, and reactions of the elements from this interactive periodic table. View images of the elements, models of their crystal structures, videos of their reactions. Graph numeric data and sort properties in a table. Periodic Table Live! is a proud winner of the MERLOT Classics Award, 2010, for the best chemistry software.

Models 360

Investigate a collection of 3-D, interactive models of organic and inorganic compounds, including extended-structure solids. Manipulate the models with your mouse to examine structure and bonding and demonstrate molecular geometries vibrations, symmetry, and orbitals.

ChemTeacher: HS Resources

ChemTeacher is especially useful to secondary school teachers and students. Resources range in level from introductory to Advanced Placement. Find reliable, quality videos, articles, demonstrations, worksheets, and activities, all searchable by topic and by science standards. The Periodic Table Resource Pack, for example, includes everything teachers and students need to investigate and learn about the periodic table.

Stereochemistry Tutorial

Master the concepts of organic stereochemistry with this interactive tutorial. It includes definitions, different three-dimensional representations, assigning priorities to stereocenters, and determining the stereochemical relationship between molecules. Each section is followed by a question set that tests knowledge and understanding.

ChemEd Moodle Courses

ChemEd Courses, based on the Moodle course management system, contains courses that teach how to use ChemEd DL resources, encourage communication among teachers, enroll and teach students online, and enable teachers to create their own courses. ChemEd Courses is the basis for ChemEd DL workshops.

The Virtual Laboratory

In the Virtual Laboratory students can design and perform many aqueous chemistry experiments safely and quickly. Use activities, laboratories, tutorials, and tests provided by the ChemCollective—or create your own!

JCE Web Software

JCE Web Software allows your students to be familiar with typical laboratory techniques before they come to lab, see videos of chemical demonstrations you do in class, interact with tutorials on many chemistry topics and so much more. JCE Web Software is all of your favorite JCE software programs delivered via the web including the Chemistry Comes Alive! collection, Lake Study, ChemPages Laboratories, and General Chemistry Multimedia Problems just to name a few. This is a fee-based resource.

VIPEr: Inorganic Resources

VIPEr (Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource) isthe place for inorganic chemists on the Web. Find teaching resources in many areas, such as coordination chemistry or solid-state chemistry, or share with other in forums on research or teaching.

Murder Mystery: Solve A Virtual Crime

Using their skills of observation and knowledge of basic chemistry concepts, students solve the mystery of a grad student's unexpected death in the lab. Students can interview suspects, investigate the crime scene for clues, and analyze the evidence from the crime lab.

ACS: Science for Kids

The American Chemical Society's (ACS) Science for Kids web site contains resources for 4th-6th grade students. Find activities, games, puzzles and articles that cover a variety of chemistry topics to share with students

Keesom and Helium

March 24^th marks the passing of Willem Hendrik Keesom. Keesom was a Dutch physicist who in 1926 first solidified helium. He compressed and cooled gaseous helium down to just 2° above absolute zero. Solidifying helium was considered an impossible task. Keesom's doctoral professor, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physics for liquefying helium. Keeson did not earn the same honor in spite of the difficulty of the achievement.

Research & Commentary: Common Core Science Standards Joy Pullmann – April 16, 2013 Heartland Institute

A consortium of consultants and science educators has released its final draft of what it plans will become national education standards for K-12 science. They are titled Next Generation Science Standards but are also Common Core science standards because created by the same groups and designed to fit with Common Core math.

Forty-five states already have adopted math and language arts Common Core standards, grade-by-grade lists of what each student must know to be deemed proficient by the government in each subject. Most states rushed to adopt them in 2009 and 2010 because the federal government required them to do so for a better chance at winning a Race to the Top stimulus grant.

Common Core proponents say their nearly national spread allows families to move between states and maintain curricular stability and allows comparisons of student achievement across states using the same measures. It also prevents states from degrading their standards, since they no longer control them. Clear, uniform, high-quality standards are necessary to create the proper expectations for schools and teachers to aim at.

Individual liberty advocates counter that centralization in education is as foolish and damaging as centralizing the economy. They note the ideological tendencies of science education toward politics as a substitute for actual science, particularly in the area of highly debatable global warming alarmism, which is falsely assumed as reality in these standards. The standards also promote a simplified understanding of science and are still incoherent despite revisions, according to several sets of reviewers. They ignore central scientific concepts and push a progressive teaching style that has been proven to erode student learning, especially for disadvantaged students.

The following documents offer more information about the Common Core science standards.